For
all those who still consider a good CD-ROM drive as a "desktop essential",
Teac offers a new solution for reading at a high speed of 52X. Although the
in our latest hardware reviews we had to do with high-end CD-R/RW and DVD recorders,
we could not resist testing the new CD-ROM drive from Teac. The performance
of the drive is compared with the already tested CD-ROM solutions from Samsung,
MSI and CyberDrive.

- Drive features

The Teac CD-552E is a 52X ATAPI CD-ROM drive. The current firmware revision
installed is v1.00 and the supported cache buffer is 128 KB.

In the following picture you can see the detailed specifications of the drive.

- The package

The
retail kit contains the drive itself, a quick installation guide, an IDE cable
and mounting screws. A multimedia CD-ROM is also bundled with information and
specifications about the Teac products. Teac offers a 2-year warranty for the
CD-552E. The retail price of the drive is 30~50 Euro, including tax.

The front panel of the drive looks generic and on the disc loading tray there
is the "Compact Disc" logo. The eject/stop button among with the fast/forward
button is placed below the tray on the right side of the front panel, as usually.
The operation LED indicates the drive's status and is active while reading.
Last, the available headphone jack and the volume control knob let you use the
drive as an audio playback device.

On the rear panel there are the usual connectors, such as the DC input, the
ATAPI interface, the device configuration jumper, and the analog/digital audio
outputs.

After removing the screws on the bottom we can see the drive's internal design
(click for a high-res).

- Installation

The
Teac drive was identified as "Teac CD-552E" under WinXP. The
drive was installed to the secondary IDE channel of our test PC as a "Master"
and worked in Ultra DMA Mode 2 transfer mode. The drive was a 2002 model came
with firmware version v1.00 installed.

For all the tests we used the latest versions of CloneCD, CDDAE, CDSpeed
and EAC. We compare the performance of the Teac drive with three other CD-ROM
drives, the Cyberdrive 52X, the MSI MS-8152 and the Samsung SC-152L (52X).